8-bit nintendo worship … and more?!

nintendo game boy

i haven’t played any game boy games this year, and i’ve been meaning to play pipe dream for a while because its core gameplay has made an appearance in other games, such as bioshock (where it appeared as a mini-game when you’re hacking machinery), and the 3DSware title mario and donkey kong. the original game was apparently called pipe mania and first appeared on amiga in 1989 and was then ported to many different platforms, including NES, but i had a copy of the game boy version which is probably pretty similar.

the gameplay is probably familiar to most people and is easy to pick up: join a random assortment of pipe pieces together to control the flow of “flooz”, a presumably toxic substance. at first i thought the goal was to get the flooz to the edge of the screen, but this isn’t the case. instead, you have a target number of pieces to join together in each stage. the point system is well balanced: bonus points are awarded for going over the minimum requirement, making loops, using tunnels that go from one side of the board to the other, and using certain pieces (either of a certain type such as pipes where flooz can only flow one way or pipes that are pre-set on the board), and points are deducted for pieces you have left over on the board, or if you substitute a piece for one you’ve already placed (and doesn’t already have flooz flowing through it). there are five difficulty levels, which are simply defined by how many upcoming pieces you can preview, and three types of music. every fourth stage you beat you’re awarded with a little cutscene of a cute little worker fixing a pipe, and a four-letter password. stages get progressively harder with more pieces pre-set on the board and higher requirements to complete the stage, but otherwise it’s just more of the same core pipe-laying action.

there’s not much more to say about the game. it’s an innocuous little time waster, and making loops and otherwise racking up points is fairly satisfying. it doesn’t rank among my favorite puzzle games ever, but it’s quite well balanced and fairly enjoyable overall. apparently a version was released on DS that adds enhancements, such as pieces that are angled in two directions and pieces you can add other pieces on top of, and that sound like it would polish the gameplay even more, but after spending a couple of hours on this game i don’t really feel the need to spend much time with its successors.

it’s been a while since i’ve played a pinball video game, so i decided to tackle kirby’s pinball land for the original game boy. the game was actually the first of many kirby spin-offs, and as with the original game boy title he appears white in the box’s artwork instead of his now-familiar pink.

the game’s setup is highly reminescent of revenge of the ‘gator, also by HAL and for game boy which preceded it by four years. like that game, in kirby’s pinball land each board is made up of three main screens and includes bonus stages. kirby’s pinball land adds boss battles into the mix, as well as three different boards and a final boss battle (against king dedede, naturally). although each screen of each board has very similar objectives (generally, hit an object a certain number of times), it’s fun to play through them all to find out how each piece of the board operates. for example, in one screen hitting the on-screen kirby on the left will make it spit out an object, while hitting the kirby on the right will make it inhale it. and in another screen you have to hit a cloud three times which will cause it to rain on the on-screen kirby, who will then pull out an umbrella; landing the pinball on the umbrella will push it up to the next part of the stage.

the review at nintendolife complained about the boards being cramped since they’re focused on being made up of single screens as opposed to having continuity between them, but i didn’t find this to be a drawback at all. that reviewer strongly favored the breakout-style game kirby’s block ball instead, whereas i have the complete opposite opinion, which is that kirby’s pinball land is fast-paced and fairly enjoyable, whereas kirby’s block ball is slow and tedious. once i’d seen all the different parts of the stages and beaten all the bosses i didn’t bother trying to master the game enough to beat the final boss, but i enjoyed my time with the game. the game controls well and makes good use of the kirby trappings, and it was fun to see all the familiar enemies. not a particularly surprising game, but casual without being completely mindless like the majority of the main kirby series, and so one of the more enjoyable kirby games i’ve played.

the combo system has turned out to be much more interesting than i’d originally thought, and i was more struck by the considerations of matching both horizontally and vertically than the first time around, although this rendition of the game itself didn’t grab me enough for me to want to invest a whole lot of time mastering the ins and outs of it. the presentation is perfectly fine for a game boy game, in terms of the graphics and sound, but the number of options is quite minimal, pretty much just your basic solo and vs. modes. i beat level 20 on the medium difficulty, but the higher levels of the high difficulty setting were incredibly cheap. i didn’t mention this in my previous post on the NES version, but as with that game at these levels the viruses are stacked so high that it really feels like it’s just a matter of luck whether or not you’ll be able to get the stack down to a point where you can actually just play the game instead of scrambling blindly. i don’t doubt that there are some dr. mario masters out there who can pwn even this level of difficulty, but for the average player it just feels unfair.

not much more to add. the game is a good portable version of the original NES classic, but with a host of modern alternatives this is a game that can be skipped over except by the most OCD of nintendo fans (like me) or those who have the nostalgia factor to contend with.

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i was in the mood for something quick and simple, so i spent some time with quarth, also for the original game boy. the game was one of the earliest released for the system, and although i’d heard about it a while back, one of the main reasons i was interested in playing it was because apparently it shares some similarities with the well-received DSiware game art style: pictobits.

quarth is an odd hybrid of a game. on the surface it mostly looks like a vertically scrolling shooter, except instead of enemies your ship is confronted with shapes that you have to “defeat” by shooting bricks at them and creating rectangles. so technically i suppose the game is more of a puzzle game than a shooter. the game is fairly low-key because you can choose which of the six stages you want to start from (plus a mode featuring randomly generated levels) and three levels of difficulty (which determine how fast the screen scrolls). you can also select among a set of ships, which modifies the background music and visuals.

the game itself is pretty ho-hum, however. creating rectangles square by square just isn’t a very compelling mechanic, and there isn’t much difference in playing the first stage at the lowest level of difficulty compared to playing the sixth stage at the highest level. at the higher levels you do have to strategize a bit more on when to use power-ups, which you earn by creating larger rectangles and which provide benefits such as increasing your firing speed or clearing the entire screen, but otherwise there isn’t much sense of progression to the game. all in all a forgettable early game boy title, but it’ll be interesting to see if and how art style: pictobits improves upon it.

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it had been a long time since i’d played a breakout style game, so i recently played through kirby’s block ball for the original game boy. (in terms of the timeline, the game was released in mid-1996, after kirby’s dream land 2 and before kirby super star on SNES.) i’d played alleyway, also for game boy, quite a few years ago, and at that time i’d mentioned that according to wikipedia: “Years later, the game’s designer Gunpei Yokoi would reuse much of Alleyway’s source code (such as paddle behavior and adapted physics engine) for the Game Boy game Kirby’s Block Ball while working with Shigeru Miyamoto’s team.” the game has a completely different feel, though, and the games don’t share much in common beyond them both being successors to ye olde breakout.

kirby’s block ball adds several key mechanics included, no doubt, to try to distinguish itself from other breakout successors such as arkanoid. like arkanoid, block ball adds powers, although not to the paddle itself but to the ball, activated by pressing the B button. the powers are inspired by the kirby games and are required for destroying certain blocks, although there are only four and they don’t feel particularly necessary. one of the bigger differences is that in some stages instead of controlling one paddle that moves across the bottom of the screen as in the other games you control as many as four paddles, one on each side of the screen. another big difference is that some bricks can only be broken when kirby does a “power bounce”, achieved by pressing the A button right as kirby hits the paddle. the power bounce also grants kirby extra speed, and invulnerability if he hits the spikes that border the stage. having to control more than one paddle and constantly press the A button to do the power bounce makes the game’s controls much fussier than other breakout-type games. others may enjoy the extra engagement, but i found the power bounces to be repetitive and tedious.

the game features ten stages each comprised of three normal stages, a sub-boss battle, and a boss battle. boss battles are exactly what you’d expect without much in the way of surprises, and each level has a high score target (called a “borderline”). in order to see the final stage and the actual ending you have to achieve the high score on every level, a feat that i quickly gave up on. the main reason for that is in order to get the high score you pretty much have to execute the bonus rounds in the levels perfectly. these are triggered by hitting a certain item and then clearing the rest of the level within a short amount of time, which proved to be overly difficult. of course a more-motivated player would actually try to improve her/his control over the ball, but even after playing through all the levels i didn’t feel particularly adept at making the ball go where i wanted it to. the game also features four mini-game type bonus levels that were more enjoyable, but don’t appear very frequently. so all in all, despite the always-cute kirby trappings, this wasn’t a particularly fun or memorable take on breakout. hopefully some of the other kirby spin-offs will impress me more.

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radar mission is an early game boy game (released about 6 months after that system’s launch) that was well on its way to fading into obscurity before the 3DS came along. since then the game has gotten renewed attention for two reasons: one, its “spiritual sequel”, steel diver, was one of the launch games for that system; and two, it was released on the 3DS’s virtual console just a few months after the 3DS debuted. the game had been on my radar well before then, though, because it was developed by nintendo R&D1, the group led by the legendary gunpei yokoi. yokoi and R&D1 were responsible for many of nintendo’s early games, including the first metroid and wario land games, and i’ve been slowly working my way through their entire output.

anyway, enough history, how’s the game? well, there’s a reason most people have never heard of it. the game consists of two distinct and pretty much completely unrelated parts. the first is simply the game known as battleship in which you place your ships on a grid and try to defeat your opponent by taking turns guessing where their ships have been hidden. the game adds some minor enhancements including an option to have near misses reported; this option makes the otherwise completely luck-based and dull game more palatable, but it still doesn’t make the game worthwhile and i quickly moved on to the second mode.

the second mode is much more entertaining. in it you take control of a submarine and in a first-person perspective you look out through your periscope, move through the water, fire torpedoes at ships, and evade enemies by ducking underwater. this mode in particular includes some impressive visuals and unusually good music, but, again, the gameplay is extremely limited and my interest in this mode was very short-lived.

not much more to say. the game only warranted a small amount of time, but it’s an interesting bit of nintendo history and it’ll be interesting to see how it compares to steel diver (although i have to admit i don’t really have high hopes about it based on my early experiences with that game). we’ll see.

my last post recounted my first forays into the world of smartphone gaming and in it i sided with nintendo CEO satoru iwata in his claim that such games were really not affecting nintendo’s business in any significant way due to the huge difference in quality between these, what i call, “disposable” games and ones that are much more considered and worthwhile. it so happened that around this same time i’ve also been playing game & watch gallery, an original game boy game that collects four of the original game & watch games, each paired with a more-modern remake featuring mario and co. i’ve been interested in the G&W games ever since i saw mr. G&W in the smash bros. series, and i was interested in seeing how these primitive games, a significant number of which were developed and released even before nintendo’s first big arcade success, donkey kong, was created.

i have to admit that at first i was a bit unimpressed. i enjoy arcade-type games (great favorites being galaga and the pac-man games), but although i thoroughly enjoyed the minimalist LCD visuals and basic beep ‘n boops, i couldn’t see myself being interested enough in the gameplay itself to even bother trying for the 1,000 points required to completely earn all the game’s stars, i.e. in-game achievements, one given for each 200 points earned.

my initial lukewarm reaction was quickly superseded by appreciation and enjoyment, which were followed soon by levels of enjoyment i only feel when playing some of the greatest games of all time. individually each of the games have their own, distinct appeal (even when comparing the classic and modern versions of the same game, the latter featuring variations that are incredibly well-designed riffs of the originals that at the same time keep the core gameplay intact), and no doubt picking favorites can be a matter of preference. but as a collection the game is a great, very well-balanced package and has an excellent amount of variety. when considering the games in comparison to the throwaway smartphone games i tried out, the differences are tremendous. in particular, despite their age the game & watch games have a sophisticated level of pacing. the action gets progressively more and more frantic as you near every additional 100-point mark and then eases up once you pass it so that it can start ramping up the difficulty again, and most of the games also feature a certain level of decision-making and having to constantly choose between pursuing a larger, riskier bonus or sticking to the slower, safer route.

although octopus and oil panic weren’t my favorites, i became fairly addicted to the modern version of fire (although the classic version is enjoyable as well), and the classic version of manhole. the modern version of fire, in which you have to catch falling toads, yoshis, and DK jrs with a trampoline, is pure twitch-action bliss. the classic version of manhole features a steep learning curve that perhaps could have been alleviated by slightly clearer design (being able to see the shadows of the figures as on the original LCD screens and in the post-game boy rereleases may help) but once the patterns are learned, recognizing them and keeping cool under the onslaught of pedestrians is wholly hypnotizing and satisfying.

which brings me back again to the question of the value of games. many of these G&W games have been rereleased on DSiware as standalone versions for $2, and although i can’t yet speak for the others, manhole is clearly worth the price. that release has become a bit obsolete, though, with the very recent release of game & watch gallery on 3DS’s virtual console for just a dollar more, but even as a standalone release manhole is miles away in quality from any of the smartphone games i’ve played thus far. at best the smartphone games feel like they’re about on the level of microgames (not even minigames!) from the warioware series, with very little of the accompanying charm, wit, or polish. the comparison isn’t quite fair, however, as the game & watch games were originally released for far more than their current price (i haven’t been able to find the exact original retail prices, but they seem to have been around $15-$20), but it’s always been clear to me, anyway, that as long as nintendo-level quality games remain exclusive to nintendo hardware i’ll stay loyal to them. even aside from that, until smartphones can support games at the level of sophistication of the best handheld console games (of which i’ve seen very little evidence thus far), there’s absolutely no reason that i can see why any even mildly serious gamer would replace a handheld console with a smartphone as his/her gaming platform of choice. this is all based on the current state of the gaming world which could easily change in the near future. i’m not making any bets, but i’m sure that nintendo is doing their research and will survive this period of uncertainty and will continue their long history of doing what they do best, even since their game & watch days: providing outstanding video game experiences. i’m looking forward to working my way through additional G&W games, and i continue to wear my nintendo fanboyism with pride. 😉